ABSTRACT
The author begins this chapter by posing the question, "teaching the maqâmât in translation to whom". A second question might well be: why would anyone wish to contemplate the idea of teaching the maqâmât in translation to such a cohort. Third, there is the entire realm of fiction and its ironic underpinnings. Many studies have appeared in recent times that consider both the precedents to al-Hamadhânî's oeuvre and its fictional characteristics. Several other examples of the maqâmâh share with the "Asadiyyah" the structural feature of being dividable into two segments, and at least two of them introduce another element into the narrative mix, namely humor or indeed farce. Both al-Shidyâq's and al-Muwayliḥî's works acknowledge a clear debt to the pre-modern tradition of the maqâmâh and its developmental phases, but in one crucial way al-Muwayliḥî breaks away, by writing a sequence of episodes in which the action is sequentially linked.
